Search form

Our staff was excited to represent the Office of Campus Sustainability at the annual RayDay festival on October 15. This festival, organized by the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, brings together vendors and organizations related to sustainability from all over the Georgia area. Attendees are able to learn about relevant programs and resources and enjoy amenities such as food trucks and beverages. Hosted at Serenbe, this free festival is a beautiful way to gather with colleagues and friends to learn more about and encourage sustainability.

In late September we were joined by local farmer and landscaper Mr. Dan Ballard for our final Sustainably Flourishing 2017 on winter gardening. Read on to see tips that he shared, and get inspired to get your winter garden going and growing!

We connected with Marcela Moreno, the Green Champion in the Carbon Neutral Energy Solutions Laboratory in the Strategic Energy Institute. They used their Work Green grant to fund a raised bed garden in their parking lot and to create a composting system. Raised bed gardening, or container gardening, is an urban style of gardening that continues to rise in popularity. This way of gardening allows for gardening in small areas that may or may not even have a patch of land to garden.

Our next Work Green Champion is Georgia Tech Strategic Consulting (GTSC). GTSC is an internal team that is focused on advancing organization excellence across the Institute. We met with half of the GTSC Work Green team, Andrew Billings and Juana Cunningham, to hear about their Work Green project. GTSC Work Green team members Kara Tillman and Byron Fitch were unable to join us for the interview. The GTSC Work Green project, titled “office-ponics,”—involved the installation and maintenance of indoor plants with the goal of improving indoor air quality.

Facilities is one of the largest departments at Georgia Tech, with 570 employees. They have achieved national acclaim through their innovative green cleaning solutions that lessens their environmental impact. Knowing that this is a huge department that is already on the cutting edge of green methods, we were excited to support their Work Green Mini-Grant project.

Consider the yellow jacket (the actual insect, not our mascot). What purpose does this pest have in our ecosystem (other than to viciously attack when disturbed)? Yellow jackets serve an important purpose by helping to control the pest population. The importance of every living creature, no matter how small, is at the heart of permaculture—the development of agricultural ecosystems that are intended to be sustainable and self-sufficient.

Composting allows nature to take its course, degrading organic materials and returning the nutrients back to the Earth. Composting is a great way to avoid sending materials to the landfill. In fact, in 2014, an estimated 2.4 million tons of organic materials were diverted from landfills due to composting.